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| Photo Doug P. |
As a child I lived in a suburban city thirty years young outside of Detroit, Michigan. Although the town at large was one spotted with shopping malls and car dealerships and subdivisions as most suburbs are, it enjoyed a unique space of hitting up against truly rural farm-centered communities, especially during the time I was growing up. My particular subdivision was located on a dead end cul-du-sac, bordered to the side against a strip of woods and backed up by a lush marshland filled with cattails, red-winged black birds, larch trees and willows. I spent days and days exploring these lands, observing them and listening, and even at that young age - communing with them.
My first interactions with the Otherworld were here. When I was a child I was a firm believer in the tangible reality of fairies, not only because my mother told me stories and fostered this belief, but because I interacted with them. In the woods and in the marsh, I could hear and feel and sometimes see them for brief moments. I would build them houses and take them offerings and a strange phenomena began to happen where I would find small toys appearing in my home and around my yard that did not belong to me nor could have been left by neighbors or children there before me. My parents once accused me of stealing them, but I was equally bewildered as where they had come from. I was, and still am, convinced that my playmates were leaving them for me. Before the age of seven or eight I did not have many human friends, but I never felt lonely among the company of the elementals that I met on my journeys.
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| Photo by Me |
As a child, magic comes naturally, or at least it did for me. It was crushing and tragic when I grew older and society taught me that these things were not real, and were more likely the product of an overactive imagination and some combination of loneliness and trauma. By the time I was ten, I knew that continued magical connection with the land had to be an active and continuous choice, and that I must prove to the land spirits I once easily communed with that I was still worthy of their attention. My grandparents sold their acreage near Ann Arbor when I was seven or eight in favor of a custom-built retirement home in rural Maine off the Bay of Fundy. Although the distance prevented more frequent visitation, their new cliff-top hamlet overlooking the briny, frigid waters of the bay, encapsulated with fog and sea salt and pine resin stirred me more than anywhere I had yet encountered. More than anything, it was loud with spirits. I could viscerally feel the presence of teams of life in that place, even as I entered adolescence and could interact freely with the spirit world less and less easily. When I was ten, during the summer between my fourth and fifth grade years, I announced to my parents that I was going to spend the summer in Maine and learn to "live off the land". In my own head, although learning the basic skills of homesteading was certainly related to my larger goal, this truly meant "I am going to Maine to initiate myself to Spirit".
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| View from my grandparent's porch at the Maine house at high tide - Photo by my mother |
On my grandparent's Maine land, there is a huge pink granite boulder that juts out of the forest and into the sea. At low tide you can walk beneath it, but at high tide you can sit on the rock and dangle your feet into the icy water and feel as if you might be swallowed by the hungry waves. "Pink rock" became a landmark to my family mostly as a place to easily gather seawater for cooking lobster, but without being able to define it in such terms, I recognized it as the sublimely liminal place that it is. It was there that I held my first initiation.
At ten years old I didn't know much about formal ceremony or ritual structure. I had not even encountered Wicca or any better known school of neopaganism. I just did what I felt drawn to do. In the week proceeding, I had learned how to sew. I didn't know why but I knew having a special garment for this ceremony was important. I had my grandmother drive me the thirty miles into town to bring me to a general store that still sold fabric. I chose a marbled blue and lavender cotton that had little tendrils of grey throughout that reminded me of calm waves caressing the pebbles of the shore at another nearby sacred site, "Jasper Beach". I spent all week stitching a dress to wear to present myself to the land that would symbolize my commitment and reverence. When the time came, I put on the garment, and made my way barefoot to the Pink Rock. I stood on the rock and felt the sound of the waves crashing against the granite wash over me, naturally letting my body become one with my environment and the land. I remember I said some words, some sort of pledge, I may have sang a song. My actual actions are hazy in my memory. I remember listening, half expecting a disembodied voice to respond to me as if in conversation, but what I heard was the voice of the earth.
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| I don't have many of my own photos of the Maine acreage, so this photo is of similar land in Maine by R Wilson Photo |
Baby witch me may have been disappointed that I couldn't make magic happen in the way I thought it should - the magic of Harry Potter and Hollywood and fantasy novels. I had not yet learned that the magic was there, powerfully there, the whole time. I had not yet learned that when interacting with nonhuman spirits, one shouldn't expect them to respond in a strictly human sense. I hadn't yet learned that my own bodily ecosystem and the currents of sensation and emotion are just as valid and, in fact, more effective ways to communicate with systems that don't use syntextual language. I did not ask for anything, certainly not anything specific, and if I had maybe I would have seen a more measurable effect. What I was there to do was to dedicate myself to a lifetime of engagement with entities and forces beyond human.
Twenty years later I have seen the effects of that meeting. As an adult, certainly throughout my teens and early twenties, my connection with Land, (in the spirit of my Rune Soup coursework I will hereby use the term Country) with Country, this has largely manifested as a profound wrongness when I act as an entity unconnected with Country. In moments where I forget that I am a single strand in a tapestry that is Country, I spin out. I become isolated and withdrawn and self-destructive. I become toxic to myself and the people and beings around me. The spirit world goes silent or maddeningly loud. I become limp.
A teacher of mine once said to me something along the lines of "if you walk the wrong path things will continue to go wrong until you change direction". For a long time in my life I struggled and struggled to achieve things that did not fit. I had a fair amount of measurable success at the things I struggled for, but even in success things were wrong. Without going into too much detail, it eventually became clear that at some point I had turned away from what fed my soul, and that I was struggling to maintain a husk of a person I did not even want to be. In this time of my life, the moments where I was best able to see this as it was were the moments I was able to genuinely reconnect with Country (earth, Spirit, the numinous, whatever you call it). Once again I could feel myself as the thread in the tapestry and eventually I was able to see that I had abandoned my commitment and abandoned my place.
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| Photo by Doug P. |
Through a long journey of flailing to find a way to right myself, I have rediscovered how integral my connection to Country is. Since coming to a place again where I can actively engage with Land, Spirit, and the more than human, my life has flourished. I find myself rediscovering places in myself I haven't interacted with since those days of running about the woods and marshes of my childhood. I find myself communing once more with the currents and motions I felt at Pink Rock. Country has allowed me to find my place, to develop my true role, and to find my true being.
So far the magical geography course has felt like coming home. Hearing elucidated concepts and wisdom I know intimately in the threads of my being, that I have become actively engaged with as part of my own recovery and rebirth, is more profound than I can describe. As I heal in myself, I find the need to facilitate healing in others, including the land, the Ancestors, and beings that make up Country.
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| Le Bagh Woods Cook Co. Forest Preserve at Beltaine- Photo by me |
The goal of "re-enchanting the world" is not one of mastery. The purpose of magic is not dominion, it is dynamic, embodied harmony that stretches across all beings on all planes. In order to find peace, we must first find healing. In ourselves, in the Land, and in the cosmos.
